Everyone from Google.com to Boing Boing to Wikipedia are blacking out their websites today in protest against what amounts to an attempt to neuter that last bastion of free speech — the internet as we know it — through legislation. The following is from The Online Photographer blog:

Click image above to go to Wikipedia site.

“To all U.S. readers: Take a moment today to go to Wikipedia, enter your ZIP Code, and follow the link to your Congressman. Tell them to vote AGAINST SOPA and PIPA, the two bills now before Congress that would suppress the internet.

This isn’t China. This isn’t a dictatorship. This is a free country with free speech enshrined in its basic principles. Protect it. If you don’t speak up, we all get what you deserve. Do it! Right now. Help save the free internet. Please.”

8 responses to “Americans, tell your Congress reps to vote against the SOPA and PIPA bills”

“Tell” is too weak of a word. I think demand is more appropriate.
When writing you congressional miscreant, inform them that voting for SOPA and PIPA amount to treason against the Constitution, the people, and the country. And that if they do vote for these bills that it is your fondest hope that they will some day be tried for treason. (And we all know the penalty for treason don’t we?)

Thomas Jefferson wisely said:
“When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.”

Let’s try to create some liberty in our country that has been infiltrated by traitors.

Absolutely correct inalienablewrights.
Everyone bears the responsibility to do their part to ensure Government serves the people by making their voice heard. Each individual cannot do it by themselves, but the will of the people is a force that is ultimately unstoppable when the people collectively take action on a common purpose towards liberty. That exercises the people’s power and unveils the true nature of who we are: SOVEREIGN BEINGS!
May all of our voices be heard loud an clear!

EcoReality.org, Bytesmiths.com, InfoArk.org, and about a dozen other sites I host today are down. As a dual citizen, I would like to apologize to my Canadian friends and neighbours for the bad behaviour of your southern neighbour.

If they get away with it there, it will only be a short time before the US-wanna-bees in Ottawa bring it on here.

Michael Geist on why Canadians should participate in the SOPA/PIPA protest:

“Some of the Internet’s leading websites, including Wikipedia, Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and BoingBoing, will go dark tomorrow to protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Protect IP Act (PIPA). The U.S. bills have generated massive public protest over proposed provisions that could cause enormous harm to the Internet and freedom of speech. My blog will join the protest by going dark tomorrow. While there is little that Canadians can do to influence U.S. legislation, there are many reasons why I think it is important for Canadians to participate.

First, the SOPA provisions are designed to have an extra-territorial effect that manifests itself particularly strongly in Canada. As I discussed in a column last year, SOPA treats all dot-com, dot-net, and dot-org domain as domestic domain names for U.S. law purposes. Moreover, it defines “domestic Internet protocol addresses” – the numeric strings that constitute the actual address of a website or Internet connection – as “an Internet Protocol address for which the corresponding Internet Protocol allocation entity is located within a judicial district of the United States.” Yet IP addresses are allocated by regional organizations, not national ones. The allocation entity located in the U.S. is called ARIN, the American Registry for Internet Numbers. Its territory includes the U.S., Canada, and 20 Caribbean nations. This bill treats all IP addresses in this region as domestic for U.S. law purposes. To put this is context, every Canadian Internet provider relies on ARIN for its block of IP addresses. In fact, ARIN even allocates the block of IP addresses used by federal and provincial governments. The U.S. bill would treat them all as domestic for U.S. law purposes.

Second, Canadian businesses and websites could easily find themselves targeted by SOPA. The bill grants the U.S. “in rem” jurisdiction over any website that does not have a domestic jurisdictional connection. For those sites, the U.S. grants jurisdiction over the property of the site and opens the door to court orders requiring Internet providers to block the site and Internet search engines to stop linking to it. Should a Canadian website owner wish to challenge the court order, U.S. law asserts itself in another way, since in order for an owner to file a challenge (described as a “counter notification”), the owner must first consent to the jurisdiction of the U.S. courts.

Third, millions of Canadians rely on the legitimate sites that are affected by the legislation. Whether creating a Wikipedia entry, posting a comment on Reddit, running a WordPress blog, participating in an open source software project, or reading a posting on BoingBoing, the lifeblood of the Internet is a direct target of SOPA. If Canadians remain silent, they may ultimately find the sites and services they rely upon silenced by this legislation….”

"Bernard is right; the pathogen is nothing; the terrain is everything."
-- Louis Pasteur's deathbed words

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"One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that 'an unjust law is no law at all'." (Martin Luther King - Letter from Birmingham Prison, Alabama)